A recent study discovered an interesting correlation between virginity and IQ. Perhaps what it didn’t take into account is that people trying to lose their virginity are so caught up with the act that they probably undergo something like temporary insanity.

Here is the picture that accompanied the original article in Bild. The photo is clearly staged. Did the young couple actually go back to their burnt room to pose for the photo? That’s what the text seems to imply. “Die junge Frau klammert sich an ihren Freund zwischen verkohlten Teddys und Schutt in ihrem Jugendzimmer” — the young lady clings to her friend between a charred teddy and debris in their attic room. “Nackt wie auf diesem Foto mussten sie von hier flüchten” — naked as in this photo they had to flee. The article goes on to describe how the girlfriend rubbed oil on her boyfriend, slipped into the bathtub, then realized the room was on fire. At the end she laments destroying her parents’ house.

While the incident itself is unfortunate — let’s hear the “burning passion” jokes now — the perverse thing may be the photographic reconstruction. Does it transform a defloration into an act of exhibitionism? Destruction into a spectacle of fire and sex that serves to titillate bored viewers? While this sort of exploitation has become common, there remains something unsettling about asking the victims of a catastrophe to reenact the moment. Can you imagine — on today, the anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks against America — asking people to pose naked in the wreckage of the Twin Towers or the Pentagon?

If you’re not brainwashed by abstinence propaganda, it is difficult to find the purity in a purity ball. If anything, there is something creepily incestuous about a formal occasion binding a woman’s hymen to her daddy’s will. Probably it provides some solace to the fathers, who never want to think of young goats banging on their daughters, but what does it do to a girl’s budding libido? Tie it up with daddy? Make it impossible for her to satisfy natural urges without deception and betrayal? Maybe she’ll delay fucking for a while, but the whole thing is a mindfuck.

Then again, the purity ball may well have a latent upside for the pervert. Are you into virgins? Forget all those porn sites offering you “first-time teens” and whatnot. Have a look at Generations of Light’s Purity Ball video. Now those damsels in white gowns are probably the real thing — if, that is, these are not the sort of girls who are saving their hymens but doing all manner of other things on the side. Haven’t you ever known one of those girls who won’t fuck but gives head like a vacuum? Or one of those girls who saves her hymen by proffering her ass? Have another look at the virgin damsels dancing with their dads, and you can be sure that their stymied libidos are causing a serious percentage of them to indulge in oral, anal, manual, and perhaps other non-genital acts as well. As a pervert, what’s not to love? These purity balls are veritable breeding grounds for perversion.

You hate to piss on somebody’s parade. It’s not nice to be mean about something that evidently has great meaning to someone. But still, it’s difficult not to view this special ceremony as a consolation prize. Here is a picture of Ms. Cannizaro. She’s a decent-looking woman. Presuming that she’s not a wallflower or psychopath, she would have had her suitors a few years back. But now? She’s a 42-year-old virgin. At this point in the game, eligible bachelors probably view her as an old maid. She seems to confirm this herself when she says, “Dating wasn’t working. I wasn’t connecting.” So instead of pissing and moaning about it, she’s trying to turn a negative into a positive. If I’m going to be a virgin, she must think, then I might as well put my virginity to some use.

Evidently the church won’t even consider a candidate for this consecration ceremony unless she’s at least thirty years old. Hell, if you can make it through your teens and twenties without having sex, it doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to consecrate yourself to Christ at the age of thirty or forty. From the vantage point of the church, this is the hymeneal equivalent of preaching to the converted: it only makes consecrated virgins out of the people most likely to remain virgins anyway. Gosh, Jesus, you sure inspire some serious commitment out of these folks.

If you’ve ever had sex — and odds are that, if you’re reading this, you have — you can’t help but feel sorry for someone who hasn’t had it and never will. It’s not that sex is always great or profound or meaningful. Sex can be a lot of different things, including ugly, tedious, and awful. But all the same, sex offers a range of intense and interesting experience. Why would you want to cut yourself off from that? The sexual beings of the world are like travelers or explorers, and to them you virgins are like people who never want to leave the small town you grew up in. If that’s what you want, that’s cool, we hope you’re happy, but it’s hard not to feel a little sad for you.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

No amount of searching could turn up any additional information about the unfortunate Mr. Burns or his sad end. You can only surmise that, since he had openly declared his intention to kill himself if he couldn’t get laid, his friends didn’t take him seriously. Maybe that was precisely the problem. Nobody took him seriously.

After all, if you knew a friend would really kill himself because of an act that would probably take no more than five minutes to perform, you’d think someone would step up to the plate and help him out. A female friend could offer a mercy fuck, or a male friend could arrange something for him. If all else fails, you could lend the kid two hundred bucks and drop him off at a whorehouse. If he was desperate enough to try to convince his friends to have a threesome, he probably would have accepted an hour with a hooker. If not — and if you were a really good friend — you could have paid the hooker to act like she was just a random stranger with uncontrollable hots for the boy.

It’s a sad tale, especially since there is such a disparity between the sexual and suicidal act. Failure to achieve a few moments of pleasure hardly seems worth putting an end to all possibility of it. No matter how many times in your life you might have felt as though you would “die if you don’t get laid,” you never really meant it like that. Evidently there were other factors pushing Mr. Burns to consider suicide, but still it sucks to think a mere lay could have at least forestalled it.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

This is a long article discussing the pros and cons of hymenoplasty. It’s well worth the read if the topic interests you.

That being said, the pros and cons are rather obvious. On one hand, this is a legal, relatively safe procedure. If it gets you off, then who’s to argue? On the other hand, it’s hard not to think that there’s something rather nefarious about the whole thing. Why should women undergo invasive surgery to restore something whose loss hurt the first time and whose loss will only hurt again the second? The story describes a woman who claims that “it took almost two months for her to feel comfortable again. It took even longer for her to enjoy sex.” That’s a lot of suffering — not to mention a lot of money to pay for the procedure — just to give some guy the relatively bogus joy of popping a hymen.

Why “bogus?” Because if you’ve ever deflowered a girl, you know that the significance of the event is mostly mental and emotional. The physical part doesn’t account for much aside from awkwardness. That’s not to say that a snug orifice isn’t better than a gaper, but it is to say that any fascination with virginity is likely “about” other things — power, innocence, pedophilia, etc. And if that’s not obvious, just consider anyone who wants to deflower a boy, since the emphasis there is not a physical transformation but a mental or emotional investment.

Good God! If there is a shred of truth to this story, doesn’t it just make the vomit rise up into your mouth? Why should anyone ever have to pay for their virginity with their life? It’s just a little flap of skin, mom. It was just a moment of temptation by a hormone-addled pubescent girl. Ok, you’re a parent and you have a right to exercise some discipline. You can ground her, take away her allowance, spank her or maybe even slap her. But to pour bleach down her throat and then asphyxiate her? Jesus. What’s the matter with you?

Somebody who is herself a parent recently argued to PervScan that any mother who kills her own child is ipso facto insane. (This sets aside, of course, those moments of extreme duress when killing the child may really be the “right” thing to do, as in the lamentable story about the mother who suffocated her crying baby in an attempt not to reveal her family’s hiding spot to invading Nazis.) And you have to admit, there is compelling reason to think that any parent who wantonly kills her own child is insane. How can you possibly transgress the nurturing bond between mother and child in such a gruesome way? And for that matter, how can you do this in front of your other kid too? In the long run, fucking up that little boy may even be more regrettable than killing his sister, since he’ll now end up wrestling with all sorts of awful demons. God knows what agony he’ll end up inflicting on other people as he struggles through life. This is how serial killers are made.

So this lady must be insane. But at the same time, presuming she’s guilty, what she did is so heinous that you’d hate to see her get off on some insanity plea. It doesn’t seem just that you could kill one of your kids, fuck up the other, and then go slurp jello in the local psych unit. And yet, it’s not just to execute insane people either. So what do you do? Kill her, incarcerate her, cure her, redeem her? This is one of those no-win stories that make you glad you’re not a judge or a jury, because no outcome is genuinely satisfactory. The whole story just fucking sucks.

(Thanks to hludens for the link.)

Look at that last sentence. Pledging succeeds in (1) delaying loss of virginity; (2) reducing promiscuity; (3) promoting marriage. Isn’t pledging really a great big success? And how do those smart-alecky researchers know for sure that teens are driven by satanic lust to break vows made before God? Maybe these pompous scientists haven’t used a gas-station bathroom lately. Who could doubt that those foul sewers of highway bacteria probably transmit venereal infections to the otherwise pure-hearted youths of today? After all, it must be those filthy toilet seats to blame. It couldn’t really be that a full eight-eight percent of pledgers break their vows, could it? Do they all take their word so lightly? Is that demon lust really so irresistible?

Given how onerous the treatment is, you half wonder why they don’t just let her act on her sexual feelings, however premature they may be. It’s not to say they should turn her over to the local pedophiles, but at least they could teach her how to masturbate. Granted, it may seem illicit to encourage a child that young to pleasure herself, but it has to be better than passively allowing her to channel her incipient feelings into horror movies. Why encourage her to associate sex with violence? She may be physically developed at age six, but she’s going to be mentally warped by age seven or eight — you’ll find her hanging out on internet chat rooms devoted to necrophilia or cannibalism before long…

It is the most natural thing in the world to laugh at the pain of others. When you see someone trip and fall, their belongings flying in all directions, you laugh. It’s hard to say why, exactly. Baudelaire claimed that laughter is simply satanic, and that may be. Or it may be that when you see something awful, you laugh as a way of warding off the thought that it could be you lying on the ground there, writhing in pain. Maybe you laugh to ward off sympathy, because if you felt sympathy with all the pain you ever saw, you’d be crippled with it.

Still, sometimes there are stories of such cruelty that it would stifle the devil’s own laughter and have him looking over his shoulder for fear that Fate, with its ironical bent, would visit the very same horrors upon him to prove that they’re only funny when they don’t happen to you. This is especially true of stories that involve children, since it’s one thing to be glib when an adult idiot brings horrors down upon himself, but it’s another thing altogether when it’s a child who is exploited.

So before you go running off to the airport to book the next flight to Brazil, fantasies of young virgins playing in your head, it would do well to remember the truly awful desperation a parent must feel to sell off his own child. And it would also do well to remember the sordid, dead-end kind of life that awaits these girls once some fat old district councillor has sullied her maidenhood with his ugly little worm.

Maybe you can easily identify with the perpetrators here — maybe you could enjoy the fantasy of being the winning bidder at the virgin auction — but still you have to recognize that there is a human cost for every act of lust, and sometimes the price the desideratum pays just isn’t worth the satisfaction the deviant can get.

The site reviewed in this story — TechnicalVirgin.com — walks a fine line between being a genuine guide to teen eroticism and a parody of other sites that promote teen abstinence. The site itself claims to be the latter, but the newspaper story fears it veers to the former — which amounts to saying that dumb teens, the same ones who don’t read the questions before giving the answers, will fall victim to the site’s exhortations to sodomy.

But is that so awful? After all, the hymen really shouldn’t be such an object of mass fixation. Losing it ought to be about the same as getting your tonsils pulled or your appendix removed — a physical, not a metaphysical, event. And the anus, conversely, really does have its virtues, as does every other part of the body. To encourage teens to explore non-genital (or at least non-vaginal) sexuality ought ultimately to create better, more sophisticated lovers — particularly boys, who tend to approach a girl with a genital single-mindedness that leaves the rest of her erogenous zones feeling like empty weed-strewn lots.